Dave Olesen's Musings from the Hoarfrost River

Yule Logs

Yule Logs

Out cutting wood yesterday, I was thinking. As our dear old planet turns through the Winter Solstice, the twice-yearly standing-still of our favorite star, there is much to ponder. As I type now it is past 6 a.m., so at least by some predictions we have squeaked past the end of the Mayan calendar. Perhaps it was a close call. Perhaps we don’t even know how close.

End of world or not, winter solstice or not, there are realities in the depth of winter that are cold and hard. At 5 a.m. my alarm chirped. I padded downstairs. I stoked the fire, suited up in coverall and bunny boots, donned headlamp, and stepped out into the darkness. Walked down to the workshop, dragged out the generator, tugged it down to the ice alongside the Bush Hawk, yanked it to life, laid out the cord, checked the heater, and plugged in. Five hours into morning, at first legal light, after further heating later on from the propane Tundra Toaster, the engine will be warm enough to start, and the plane warm enough to fly to Yellowknife. Christmas guests to fetch – a father and his two sons.

Our winter woodpile is in its all-too-common Solstice state of slimness – not quite in the red zone but certainly well into the yellow and far from the green. I was thinking the other day that one common romantic perception of life in the woods is that the woodpiles are always stacked and ready, brim-full and abundantly adequate, by the time the last leaves of autumn fall. This has never been my experience. There may have been a couple of years when the woodshed saw us all the way through winter, but those winters have been few and far between, and probably uncommonly mild, and likely held some long stretches when we were away from here and not heating all these darned buildings.

I suppose it is as much a matter of wishful vicarious thinking as anything else. I sometimes picture what my life would be like in a cosmopolitan city, were I ever to jump ship and leave the bush. Copenhagen, say, or Cologne, or San Francisco. I picture that life as naively as city people must picture ours. Long afternoons at sidewalk cafes, reading the paper or a book of poems, sipping espresso until late afternoon, when it might be time to switch to beer or wine. A little apartment, a friendly landlord, rugs and a sofa and an easy chair. Perhaps I would take up pipe smoking again. I never imagine grimy subway-station urinals, traffic jams, power outages, street people lying in alleys, gunfire in the dark, sirens, or heavy traffic.

So it is with woodpiles, and many other aspects of the bush life. The realities are mostly at odds with the romantic vision. Oh I know there are superior human beings out there in other parts of the hinterland, with firewood stacked in enormous neat piles, split and dry, ready for winter. But look closer and you may find that the firewood has in fact been purchased from a local purveyor of cordwood, or that there is in fact a backup heat source in the house, or that the wood-heated house is not in full-time year-round use in one of the coldest climates inside of the treeline , with woodburning sauna, wood-heated workshop, wood-fired dog barn and dogfood cooker for 39 dogs, woodstove in guest cabin, and yet another one in the smaller guest cabin… Which leads to another rhetorical question: how big would people’s houses be if everyone heated with wood they gathered themselves?

You get the idea. The woodshed will not provide through the coming months without some steady input. So I’ll be out cutting and hauling, right through the winter, whenever my days allow and coincide with some milder weather. Hopefully we can avoid wood-gathering at minus-40, with bow-saws. That is not fun, but it can be done.

There is no oak or maple at these latitudes. We take what we can find, close to home and not too steep. Mostly black and white spruce, with a smattering of tamarack and some carefully rationed birch. All in all it is easy enough to find dry standing wood.

As for Thoreau’s famous adage about firewood that warms you twice, I think he had the right idea but his number was way off. Warmed by snowshoeing in from the main trail to find the stand of tall dead spruce, warmed by yanking on the chainsaw to coax it into life at 25 below, warmed by felling, warmed by stacking, warmed by hauling, warmed by untangling dogs and getting bobsled back on trail, warmed by stacking again, warmed by bucking and throwing, warmed by stacking yet again, warmed by splitting, warmed by carrying into house, and warmed… thoroughly and completely and finally… by burning in the maw of that lovely cast-iron stove.

Thinking along these lines the other day as I cut and hauled wood, I was struck by the paradoxical, almost incomprehensible tradition of the giant Yule bonfires. When wood is coming in by hand, without chainsaws, without pickup trucks, with houses full of children to keep warm and winter at its very darkest and coldest, what an amazing and paradoxical form of celebration: hey I know, let’s stack up a huge pile of dry wood and set it all on fire, all at once, and dance around it! How amazingly and wonderfully human, that willingness to give over such a precious commodity to mark the passing of the world through the narrows of another year.

I would be hard pressed to give much of my wood to a giant bonfire right now, that’s for sure. But for a big barrel of mead and some wild revelry with like-minded friends, I would.